


four-by-fours

by seraphy



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Internal Monologue, Light Angst, M/M, Platonic friendships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 05:36:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19761670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphy/pseuds/seraphy
Summary: “Ana told him to let go. She told him this as he turned his ring around in the Cairo heat. Twisting it, around and around, a silver, morbid carousel of love and hatred and grief and loss.”Jack reflects on his life at the place that was once home.





	four-by-fours

**Author's Note:**

> found this sitting in my docs, so i decided to turn it into a little rambly oneshot.

There are days, long days, he wishes for Indiana, the sameness of the earth, the hollow spirit of it all, masqueraded as piety. The obscurity and the expanse of the fields, a seductress in their own right, intense and oppressive in the darkness, beckoning him with a wispy promise of freedom. He measured his growth by the stalks, by the marks on his doorway, dated, chronologically, in ascending order. And the days passed with an aching slowness, a quiet lull, his identity indiscernible from that of the country. That feeling of traveling the same land, acre by acre, memorizing it down to the bone, until he was one with it; he learned, then, about the smell of ripeness rising from the earth, about harvesting until sunset, about the inevitable oneness that comes with living off of the land. 

Returning to his room now, there remains the hallmarks of his youth: the burnt edges of meaningless, scattered awards, the bed stripped, some trophy for sportsmanship displaced on the floor. Faintly, the woodwork still reeks of burning, and if he touches the charred ends of the blue drapery, he swears it is still warm. 

And he feels no oneness, for all that was here was unnatural: the means of its finale, the hand that set this tiny world ablaze, so mechanically, for that is war. The act of othering. The lack of humanness to justify the means to the end. The room simultaneously acts as a museum for the past and a memorial to the present; one end of the room is unscathed, the other end gaping, blackened, and wartorn. 

He wonders if his mother went peacefully, or if she burned to death as an effigy for something she did not understand, because Indiana constantly seemed to be wedded to its own standstill, its own tradition of blissful ignorance. The crucifix above his door is unharmed, and he knows she would praise it as an act of God, hands clasping in a paroxysmal reverence. (The irony. His father was a firefighter.) 

On the nightstand, pitifully stained by ash and cracked by the concussive blast, lays a picture of his younger self: grinning, in the dentist’s chair, his mouth gappy, brandishing his toothlessness with a debonair pride. He remembers his father shaking his head disdainfully in the background.  _ Hockey _ , he spat.  _ Play something like baseball.  _

Looking at it, he almost wants to smile. He brushes his thumb across the fissured glass, and the frame falls apart at that touch, revealing the preserved photo underneath. 

He sits on the edge of his bed, and when the wind blows in, the charred papers flutter in protest, and the silence falls again--delicately, like ash. How small he had been then, tan from the long eternities in the sun, ignorant to the war brewing, catching glimpses of a riot an ocean away on another continent he had never seen nor visited. Soft, still, from the lack of war, from the lack of scarring. Soft in his ignorance, in his effulgence, in that brilliance radiating from his smile. It’s almost like looking at another person’s life. There is a spark of something morose and mournful in his chest.

Adjacent to that, blown and scattered by the shockwave, lies a cemetery of four-by-fours, and, once strung together delicately, would have portrayed the life of that same boy. His twin sisters, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, staring complacently at the camera with their round faces, and his body sandwiched between them. All sharpness. Sharp cheekbones, sharp jaw, sharp hair, sharper eyes. Blond and blue eyes. 

They looked almost dreamy, spines tight and hands folded neatly in their laps: a portrait of perfect stillness, sculpted in the image of their mother. They’re nearly mirrors of one another. In another picture, their mouths hint at a pocketed smile. No doubt he was up to something off-camera in order to get them to laugh and shed their stiffness. He’s seen them do it; maybe not when his parents were around, but he taught them silly, old-fashioned dances to his father’s old record vinyls. The most rebellious thing he did back then was probably stealing into his father’s room and running off with the records, too big for his fleshy hands.

Mother, in fact, was of the same image. Ma’am and mother only. She was a city woman, bequeathed with jewels and tiers of wealth—she saw the farm as a waste of investment, craving the diamond wealth of the city world, a world unknown to him for many years (until he found it preserved, that is, in one man, the many characteristics of the city jumbled into one—its quickness and simultaneous ease, its turbulence, so different from the cold materialism of who he called mother.)

At a young age she gifted him with a crucifix. Said he needed to be baptized.  _ Were you baptized?  _

He answered  _ I don’t know, _ and so he was baptized. 

It was the same mother that bemoaned what she called a waste of time, money, and her life—that she didn’t marry to rot away in the countryside—proclaiming, to his dismay, that “another was on the way.” 

His father, though, was a beast of its own; head of the firefighter department, he was always caught in the spirit of his own heroism and holding his son to that same standard. So, his lack of attention wasn’t necessarily attributed to intentional neglect, but rather self-absorption. He remembers, vaguely--the memory is young, alive with color and still images in the sense that all young memories are--the tired sensation of his cold feet in the snow, cheeks ruddy and eyes cinched from the wind, struggling to see him over his car window. His hands pressed flatly against the glass, he waved his goodbye with his toothy smile before being urged back by his mother’s grip so he wouldn’t be hurt. When he came home he always smelled like soot and like something vaguely burning, vaguely ill--he would call it death now--and a chemical scent that made his nose wrinkle even then. 

He had brought Gabriel here, once;  _ was it a lifetime ago _ ? Showed him the way of the countryside, the earth and its language of swaying trees and branches creaking against the window, an effulgent dawn that the city had always extinguished and dimmed.  _ Farmboy,  _ he teased, the sound of his voice warped by time,  _ what do you do for fun around here? Mow the lawn?  _

And he had laughed—he laughs now, an oddly bright sound in an otherwise gray world, a landscape of muddied memory and sallow four-by-fours. He remembers how they kissed in the same field he prayed for deliverance, given by a great hand that never answered his prayers—or maybe he had, maybe Gabriel was the answer, maybe Gabriel was the  _ amen _ —how the color of his eyes danced in the sunlight like liquid gold. How his skin gave beneath his fingers, how it bruised under his touch...

Gabriel’s memory, as it always does, ushers in equal parts light and darkness. Gabriel was dead when he found him in the ruins of Zürich. It had been his worst nightmare manifested. Sometimes, when he wakes up, he swears he can still smell the blood.

The smell of ash and blood. The two constants in his life. His life orbited around them, like a sick, teetering mobile above a baby’s cradle.

Gabriel’s face, a young and still image. 

Gabriel told him, once, that he could sense ghosts; Jack wondered if he had the same ability, if the world would turn distinctly different—if he would feel it, like a bullet—when Gabriel’s presence was ripped from it. If he would feel the echoes of his presence, if Gabriel would haunt him, stalk the shadows of his dreams. Is the lack of his presence a good thing? Would he feel if Gabriel was around? Or has Gabriel abandoned him entirely? 

_ Gabriel. Like the angel.  _

He would like to think Gabriel watches over him. After all, he dedicated his life to preserving his memory. Every act is committed in his name, both as an act of preservation and as an act of penance—that when they meet again, he will be worthy of him. Gabriel will forgive him. Ana told him to let go. She told him this as he turned his ring around in the Cairo heat. Twisting it, around and around, a silver, morbid carousel of love and hatred and grief and loss.  _ He’s gone, it’s time to move on.  _ As if. As if he could ever forget him. Ask an animal to forget the hunt. Ask a predator to forget the thrill of bloodshed. Ask a human to forget how to dream. 

_ I won’t forget him.  _

Not everyone had the privilege of running like Ana did.

He had forgiven her for that. He told himself he had, but a small part of him held onto that anger, like an animal nursing a wound. He told himself, when he saw her face again, that he could learn to forgive her—even if he forgot how to—despite the nightmares of her death that persisted well after a decade. Despite his unanswered call to arms:  _ why not me? Why her and not me?  _

She comes in silently. She’s got the mind of a sniper and the feet of one too. No one else would have heard it, but his sensitive ears picked it up, loud as dropped porcelain. He knows she’s watching, in that silent, appraising way she does, and he wonders where her den of memories is—if she ever retreats to it—if she knows what he’s thinking. How he turns over a million deaths in his head. How he could have prevented each one. He doesn’t want her comfort. It’s not her burden to bear. 

She senses this. She senses his mourning, and he knows she probably thinks he was never like this. And that is a lie. He was simply better at hiding it back then. She was better at hiding it too. It seems they’re both epigones, and he knows staying here is only walking himself in circles, a confused animal looking for the shadow it saw out of the corner of its eye, all bared teeth and raised shackles. 

“Jack, it’s time to go.” 

He looks into her eyes. They’re still clinging to a glimmer of hope, and they look warm, even in the wan moonlight. In this silence, he can hear her heart—out of the right ear, the one facing away from the explosion—hear its steady, lumbering gait, the reminder of what was and what is, what is memory and what is not. 

Ana is not memory. That’s why seeing her shocked him. It was, quite literally, like seeing a ghost; he reconciled with her absence years ago. There were times in Cairo that they both woke up from nightmares. Touched each others’ hands to remind themselves of what is real and what isn’t. Those moments were rare moments of peace, as if his world wasn’t hell, as if there wasn’t only two thirds of a whole in it. 

He sees her bow her head, as if in reverence, like this is sacred ground. She must be thinking of him too, and thankfully she doesn’t tell him to move on this time. Under the crushing scent of humidity and sweat, he can smell the fragrance of tea and chamomile. It helped her sleep. 

He thought he didn’t want comfort, but he touches her wrist anyway. The smell of ash becomes just a bit more bearable. 


End file.
